In
something of a rarity, Hit & Run
manages to make us dislike just about all of its major characters within a
minute of meeting them. The movie
opens with obnoxious pillow talk that includes shallowly "hip" pop
culture references, awkwardly "playful" accusations of venereal
diseases, and questionably "good-natured" face-slapping. We always want to give even the foulest of characters the benefit of the
doubt because they might turn out to be interesting, but, while there's nothing
actually evil about these people, that feeling of openness to whatever these
characters might offer disappears pretty quickly.

The
opening scene just creates a sensation of wanting to get out of that bedroom and
away from Charlie Bronson (Dax Shepard, who also wrote the screenplay and
co-directed the movie), which—as you might have guessed—is not his real
name, and Annie (Kristen Bell) for somewhere—anywhere—else and with some
people—any people—who aren't them. This
feeling, as it turns out, is mistaken, since the jokes get worse and the other
characters aren't much better.

Charlie,
whose actual name comes from another actor who was popular in the 1960s and '70s
(The revelation of the name is one of the few amusing moments in the movie), is
in the Witness Protection Program after turning witness for the prosecution
against his former partners in a string of bank robberies. He was their getaway
driver. It's
been four years since that all happened. After
a year, things are getting serious with Annie. He's hesitant to tell her about the details of his past life, lest she
leave him.

Debby
(Kristin Chenoweth), the head of the local community college where Annie
teaches, has other plans in store. After
a long rant about how men have the tendency to keep women from living up to
their full ambitions, Debby gives Annie an ultimatum: Take an interview for a
job at a university in Los Angeles, where the dean has created a position just
for her, or be fired.

That
conversation, like the one in the bedroom that starts the movie, gets to the
core of the unpleasant nature of Shepard's screenplay. Debby's heart-to-heart talk with Annie has some valid points, and they
come at the beginning of the scene. The
scene then goes further, letting Debby reveal more than too much information
about her own past experiences until the point that the scene becomes
uncomfortable and she starts to become a grating presence.

The
script continues this unfortunate tendency with the rest of the characters. Charlie's protection, a U.S. Marshal named Randy (Tom Arnold), enters the
movie with a big, unlikely gag in which he accidentally spills coffee on himself
while on the phone, gets out of his van, and has to chase it as the vehicle gets
out gear and rolls down a hill, around some turns, and straight toward two girls
playing in their front yard. His
on-the-fly decision to stop the van is to pull out his gun and start shooting at.
We assume he's aiming for the
tires but winds up firing fairly close to the girls. If reckless endangerment like that is meant to be endearing, it's a
complete miscalculation.

Randy's
other traits are that he is prone to misfiring his weapon and that he hides his
sexuality. By comparison, that
latter characteristic is slightly less stereotypical than Terry (Jess Rowland),
a Sheriff's deputy who has an application on his phone that lets him track down
other gay men in the area (Again, his introductory scene goes on and on until it
the stereotype becomes tiringly solidified), or a conversation between Charlie
and Annie in which she explains why he shouldn't use one derogatory term—all
the while comfortably saying it herself—by comparing it to another—all the
while shortening it to "the N-word."

Anyway,
Charlie decides he can't live without Annie and packs up their things in his
souped-up, custom car so that they can start a new life in L.A., where his past
troubles occurred. On their tail are
Annie's ex-boyfriend Gil (Michael Rosenbaum), who is a possessive freak, and
Charlie's old accomplices Alex Dimitri (Bradley Cooper), Neve (Joy Bryant), and
Allen (Ryan Hansen). Alex wants
revenge because he was violated in jail; Charlie is strangely fixated on what
the assailant's race was.

None
of this is funny, and all that keeps Hit
& Run from the absolute dredges are the car chases that serve as
interludes between the sections of plot. Shepard
and co-director David Palmer show some competence in these sequences, even if
they are routine and offer little in the way of excitement (One simply has cars
driving in a circle on an abandoned airfield). It says something that something so bland looks better than everything
else.